Real World IT

George Ou's networking and security insights keep enterprise managers in the know and vendors up at night.

George Ou

George Ou, a former ZDNet blogger, is an IT consultant specializing in Servers, Microsoft, Cisco, Switches, Routers, Firewalls, IDS, VPN, Wireless LAN, Security, and IT infrastructure and architecture.</p>

Latest Posts

ZDNet blogs has been my online home since 2004. With the help and a lot of guidance from David Berlind, Stephen Howard-Sarin, and David Grober, I was brought in to the world of blogging and journalism.

Most computer builders in the world think I'm nuts for endorsing the use of 330 watt power supplies for a high-end performance computer. Conventional "wisdom" says that anything under 500 watts is inadequate for an enthusiast PC.

Bob Briscoe (Chief researcher at the BT Network Research Centre) is on a mission to tackle one of the biggest problems facing the Internet. He wants the world to know that TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) congestion control is fundamentally broken and he has a proposal for the IETF to fix the root cause of the problem.

There's a lot of money to be made in the HDMI cabling and switch aftermarket and unfortunately that means a lot of consumers are getting tricked in to paying outrageous prices. I've spent quite a bit of time helping my friends set up their home theaters recently and I thought I'd share that knowledge with my readers.

What happens when you want to just want a bunch of phones in your business, hotel, or organization and you don't need a bunch of fancy and complicated features on the phone? It's simple, just get a bunch of cheap analog phones.

In the world where chip technology improves exponentially, acoustic engineering isn't so simple and it presents a huge hurdle to overcome to the world of telephony and video conferencing. Fraunhofer IIS (inventors of MPEG-1 Layer 3 AKA MP3) seeks to tackle this challenge and showed off some of its research and upcoming products at VON.

Four of Japan's largest Internet provider organizations have come to an agreement with copyright holders on how to tackle the illegal file trading on P2P (Peer to Peer) networks. Comprised of about 1000 major and smaller Japanese Internet providers, the four organizations agreed to target flagrant copyright violators by first warning them and then banning them if their behavior doesn't change.

HyperTransport 3 which was once slated for AMD's Barcelona server processors seem to be delayed again on Shanghai until some time in 2009 when it finally arrives for the "Montreal" quad- and octal-core CPUs. According to page 21 of Mario Rivas' slides, the roadmap clearly indicates AMD's first 45nm processor Shanghai won't get the newer inter-processor interconnect and it will instead use the older HyperTransport 1 interconnects.

Credit: Fuad Abazovic, FudzillaPhotos of CPU-Z highlighting AMD's 45nm Shanghai quad-core processor appeared on Fudzilla last week. It confirms that AMD's latest processor will have a total of 2 megabytes L2 cache (512 KB per core), and 6 megabytes of shared L3 cache.

With all the negative attention headed towards Comcast lately, AT&T's problems seem to be slipping below the radar. Unfortunately for me, those problems are first hand for me as I'm personally suffering degradations in speed.

I appeared before congressional and government staffers on Capitol Hill for a panel on Network Management sponsored by iGrowthGlobal. This was my first time in Washington DC and while it was a little cold for my Californian bones, it was a beautiful city and seeing the capitol of the nation was certainly a worthwhile experience.

At the Heroes Happens {here} event in LA yesterday which saw the launch* of Windows Server 2008, one of the relatively hidden gems of the event in my opinion was Microsoft's free** Search Server 2008 Express. It's is a streamline install of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with almost all the enterprise search features that most users would want and is a must download for any Windows Server shop.